Thanks for sticking with me. Much on which to report, and caffeine on which to report it.
A week ago today – on 4 May 2024 – I finished a 24-day massage therapy course at TTC Massage, Bangkok, under the tutelage of Brendan, Alissa, Duang and Nita. Launching into this was fairly premeditated, but also, you know, it was one of those things that lined various stars up with each other. I love a project. And now I have a certificate, and a string to my bow, and something I can do with my hands besides typing on a keyboard, kneading dough and strumming a gee-tar. Anyone considering learning this skill would do well to check out TTC. They are absolutely lovely, teach in English, laugh readily, and (I guess most importantly) know what the heck they are doing.
Besides kneading folks’ backs and legs, numerous fun things occupied my time in Bangkok. I caught up with old Chengdu friends, which has been a dear thing. Made one or two more along the way, too. I have been climbing, and learning how to play padel tennis – it’s awesome, you should try it. But if you do it during the hottest month central Thailand has ever known, in a warehouse without air conditioning, know that you will lose half your bodyweight in perspiration during the course of a single hour.
I boogied, several times; made actual bread in an actual oven, and cookies galore, the sum of which led the Frenchmen whose flat I’m staying in to jest that I should replace, as a full time resident, the man whose room I’m staying in. Eugene, a man I’m glad I know, and not just because his bed became available at a most convenient time. I’m very fond of my French flatmates, too. I did not do much of the tourist stuff I thought I might. I went to one temple complex. But I did watch a series of nationally syndicated muay thai fights, one of which was over after no more than 15 seconds. KO. Kid on the floor. Kid helping him up. Kids fighting, tooth and claw. Blood and sniffing salts. My face was on telly at least twice, in sharp focus.
I interviewed an Australian poet whom I like very much for The Friday Poem. We’ll publish that in a few weeks’ time. Before that, I wrote a piece about a small handful of poets using social media to their advantage. Like Rupi Kaur, but more contemporary and (I think) more creative. Darby, whom I interviewed, is one of those poets. And yesterday, my (sort of) review of Taylor Swift’s new double album The Tortured Poets Department went up. I pitched it half as a joke, but my dear editor took the bait. For a while I felt like I’d bitten off more than I could chew, like I was out of my depth in music criticism and pop sugar land. But actually I think it turned out all right. You may not need to be a Swiftie to enjoy reading it.
I have also been working sporadically on a poetry pamphlet and my Substack, but can’t offer much new information on either of those at this stage.
This week, I have mostly been eating: tofu massaman curry. I’ve been on the island of Koh Tao. Or, since koh, sometimes written ko, is a transliteration of the Thai word for “island”, I’ve been on the island of Tao. I came to learn freediving. Did a basic course. Did an apnea clinic, which is the first day of the advanced course. Held my breath for 3 minutes and 15 seconds, a Personal Best. Advanced course was fully booked by the time I’d finished that, so yesterday I went snorkelling in choppy, low-visibility waters. No sweat. Plenty of Dorys and a big silver-pink fish I would’ve called something like Marvin, or Graham. I have a low CO2 tolerance, apparently, but while holding my breath for 2 minutes and 40 seconds my oxygen level didn’t drop below 96%, which means I should, in theory, be able to hold my breath for a long time if I can train my body to chill the F out about CO2 buildup.
At some point I would like to return to Ko Tao to continue my underwater studies. There’s something very beautiful about the stillness of the line – the line you dive down – and the oblivion you enter when you leave the surface. I’m hardly in a position to wax poetic about the joys of underwater life, I know, but my brief exposure was enough to motivate me to want to continue on that journey. All in the fullness of time. On the first day, there was a wicked storm. Rain lashed the seas. A harsh wind blew. And, looking up at the surface from a few metres under, it looked like it was being smashed by a blizzard. Froth and foam. But still and silent beneath.
I’m pressing pause on the Trip, for those of you who don’t know this yet. On 27 May, I’ll fly back to the UK, see some Very Important People in London, Bristol, Sheffield and Devon, then France and possibly Amsterdam; make some cash; celebrate my 30th birthday with dear old friends; and recharge my batteries (by drinking REAL ALE, eating FISH and CHIPS, and shivering in the British summer winds). I don’t know yet how long I’ll be back for. Word is, approx 3 months (i.e., June, July and August), before returning to Bangkok to pick up where I left off and do some real earning in Australia, or approx 7 months, to take in Christmas and NYE, be around for a Very Important Birthday, soak up festive spirits, and earn on British soil, before returning to Bangkok to pick up where I left off.
Some days, I lean one way, some days the other. Factors affecting this include how my dear friend Edward feels about me occupying his spare room for an extended period of time. Before then, I will fly to Borneo to see the Most Important Person. Malaysia will be, I think, the 64th country I have visited.
Hi everybody. There are two more pieces to read in my Substack publication, My Special Interest.
‘Ceremony of Innocence’ (readable here) takes its name from W B Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’. It’s a chonky essay about the origins of astrology and astronomy, and archaeological evidence that suggests (often very strongly) that human beings have been tracking the movements of the stars, and reading into those movements, for longer than we’ve been doing just about anything else. In other words, astrology may be one of the things that makes us human, and one of very few practices that unite cultures throughout history, and all over the world.
The most recent upload leads with a slightly provocative question: Was Jesus of Nazareth Autistic? (click here to read it) This question isn’t definitively answerable, but that’s not the point. Thinking about the idea that one of the most significant literary-historical figures in all of human history was in fact neurodiverse, in some way, can actually be very interesting. This piece was informed by my reading three texts – a novel, a nonfiction book, and an academic article about the role of “collaborative morality” in the “emergence of personality variation and autistic traits”.
In other news, I’m back in Bangkok, staying in a wonderful flat with three Frenchmen, in the room of a friend I met first in Ukraine, in the village of Polyanytsya, in the gorgeous Carpathian Mountains. It’s good to be here, among friends old and new. Today, I baked bread and chocolate chip cookies, and drank wheat beer in the afternoon. I also went to the gym in the morning, but only managed about 30 minutes before I was too sweaty to touch anything. It’s hot season in Thailand. Next week I’ll start my massage therapy course, and the week after that is the biggest holiday in the Thai calendar: Songkran, aka Thai New Year.
I’ll leave you, just for the stinking hell of it, with a video of the inimitable Tom Waits reading a poem by the incorrigible Charles Bukowski. See you when I see you! X
I’m eating Indian food in a hotel in Vientiane – dal, vegetable pakoras, coriander sauce and masala chai. You know, I had dinner with three German women in Vang Vieng (a town north of here) at an Indian restaurant, and not one of them had ever had masala chai = had never lived! They didn’t even know what it was! So I said they should try mine, and their lives were changed forever. And then I started dreaming about the ice cream I used to make in Sri Lanka, with homemade coconut milk and a masala chai base, with whisky-soaked raisins. God almighty. So anyway I had to move to this hotel from a hostel, where I spent the last five nights, because I needed peace and quiet. My social battery gradually emptied, and when I topped it up with alcohol, the alcohol beat me round the head. Tale as old as time. Now I have air conditioning and Indian food, and I’m the one laughing.
I just wrote a poem about how chance encounters can feel serendipitous. Things fall into place when you least expect them to. You can read it here. And, naturally, in the writing of it, I went on a journey through all the meetings I’ve had with people while on this journey, especially since the beginning of this year, when I’ve been travelling independently.
And I dwelt on a conversation I had with a Nigerian British man called Dele and a Bolivian woman called Maria, which was one of those conversations you could transcribe and, with some editing, make into some pretty entertaining TV dialogue. Lots of callbacks and cute bits of self-referentiality. We were talking about China, obviously, and at some point, Dele said something along the lines of, ‘the things we take for free often turn out to be the most costly’. In other words, be careful what you take for granted. As an aphorism, it’s not dissimilar from ‘if it looks too good to be true, it probably is’, which is almost bomb-proof. I might have my mum to thank for that one, along with ‘buy cheap, buy twice’.
All of these phrases, to varying degrees, discourage optimism. What if I buy cheap (from, er, China) and it turns out great? What if something looks too good to be true and it turns out to be as good as it looks? But optimism can only take you so far, and if it’s blind, it won’t take you very far at all. You have to pair it with something. And anyway, the point of an aphorism isn’t that you can turn to it for answers whenever you’re in a bind. An aphorism is like a torch in the darkness. It provides a limited view. Or it’s a lighthouse, keeping you off the rocks.
And then, a day or two later, there was something I said that Maria interpreted as containing some sort of wisdom, and she wrote it down. If this has happened to you then you, too, know what it’s like to feel like a sage. We were talking about adaptation, and how unforeseeable events can derail even the most well planned and well researched itineraries. (This recently happened to me. The trip from Vientiane to Siem Reap is in two parts: part one, to Pakse, is on a bus capable of transporting a bicycle; part two, from Pakse into Cambodia and down to Siem Reap, is in a minivan, which apparently cannot guarantee carriage of a bicycle. So I’m cycling straight into Thailand instead, across the First Thai–Lao Friendship Bridge, and will shake my groove thing from there.)
I digress. I said something like, ‘a plan you made yesterday is better than one you made a year ago, because it was made by a more recent version of you’. Because – and I appreciate this now more than I ever have, and it’s especially true during periods of flux and accelerated development – you are not the same you that you were then. The plan you made a year ago, or ten years ago, can be a source of comfort. Falling back on it can feel safe. But in doing so, you run the risk of ignoring your present self – a self with different priorities. Growth happens when you update your priorities.
This is getting very self-helpy. Eugh. But it’s super relevant to my current situation, and I daresay relevant to many others. It’s part of the reason I’ve always been so baffled by people who knew what they wanted to be when they were older. What I’ve wanted to be has constantly changed. And sure, this has, thus far, held me back from sticking with anything long enough to master it. I’ve played many instruments and currently play none. I’ve tried writing in several formats, but never really stuck with any of them. I’ve never committed fully to a job in a way that allowed for much professional development.
And when I conceived of this trip, it looked a particular way. Actually, I idealised that vision to the point where I became inflexible regarding it, and it clashed with reality. For years, I deferred to this plan that I’d made in the past, all the while doing very little to ensure that it was a plan that worked for me/us in the present. I didn’t update my plan to suit our (then-)present circumstances. And in doing so, I ignored my own advice – advice that was sufficiently wise to be written down!!! I bet there’s an aphorism for that. Or a paradox. Oh yes, it’s the Solomon Paradox.
King Solomon was known for his legendary wisdom, and loved dishing out advice. But he struggled to follow the advice he gave to others. For example, he warned others not to marry many wives, saying ‘he who loves many women is not wise’. He then proceeded to marry 700 women, and had 300 concubines to boot. Oh, Solomon. I mean, come on! He also wrote about the futility of building large monuments, describing such things as ‘vain’. And then he built a big temple. So, he was able to impart wisdom to others but not heed it himself. Personally, I don’t think I impart much wisdom to others. But I am trying to be a bit more deliberate with the wisdom I follow.
Everything they told you about Laos is true. It’s basically a magical land. There are whole squadrons of albino carabaos, the earth and dust are tinged with a Seuss-esque purple, kids run along the road in Spider-Man costumes and onesies, hollering ‘bye-bye, bye-bye!’ as you pass by, men and women of all ages beckon you into their houses to drink potent lao-hai out of bamboo straws from large earthenware pots, cows trot skittishly alongside, nimble as foals, and the cockerels truncate their calls so that they cry a staccato ’cockerdoodld-’. Laotians eat more sticky rice than the people of any other country.
While here, it’s been impossible not to think about, learn about, and weep at the ongoing suffering caused by, America’s bombing campaign of Laos.
The Indochina wars of the 20th century brought ruin to much of Southeast Asia, and in some ways, history regards the Laotian Civil War of 1959 to 1975 as a footnote to the Vietnam War (the Vietnamese call it the American War), but pretty much as soon as you get here, you can see the carnage it caused. The roads are broken. There are bomb craters. Unexploded ordnance (UXO) continues to maim and kill people working in fields and the jungle. Horses swallow sub-munitions that explode in their stomachs. Ducks stumble upon fragments of cluster-bombs. In Vieng Xai you can tour the caves where the Pathet Lao – the communist resistance fighters – hid during the worst years, from 1964 to 1973. You can snoop round the bedrooms and living quarters and kitchens and meeting rooms of the generals, and walk through the unlit, rock-walled maternity wards, where women gave birth and nursed their babies in the dark while American bombers searched desperately for innocent people to kill.
In excess of 270 million Estimated number of sub-munitions (in Lao they’re called ‘bombies’) from cluster bombs dropped over Lao PDR (Laos’ formal name: Lao People’s Democratic Republic) between 1964 and 1973.
30% Estimated failure rate of sub-munitions under ideal conditions.
80 million Estimated number of sub-munitions that failed to explode.
446,711 or 0.55% Number or percentage of estimated unexploded sub-munitions destroyed by UXO Lao from 1996 to May 2010.
The French army withdrew from Laos in 1954 and it became officially independent. Except it wasn’t actually independent, because no one would leave it alone. Before it started bombing the proverbial and literal shit out of this unbelievably beautiful landlocked nation, the US was funnelling money into its elections (and was paying 100% of the Lao military budget in 1955, paid its generals’ salaries, etc), manipulating it politically from the inside and hoping against hope that the bloody communists (with support from the east, aka North Vietnam, and later the Soviet Union) would stop being communists. It supported the 1960 neutralist coup and simultaneously supported covert counter-coup efforts. Ultimately, election fixing, diplomatic meddling and funds-funnelling failed to win an entire country over to a political ideology that was completely alien to them (and whose inherent Westernness smacked of its colonial past). A Soviet military air bridge into Vientiane, flying artillery and gunners in to reinforce the Neutralist/Pathet Lao coalition may have been the straw that broke imperialist America’s back, because the US then went into overdrive. It flew in napalm-carrying B-26 Invader bombers from Taiwan, then T-6 Texans (gunner planes), and H-34 helicopters.
But 1964 is when the shit really hit the fan. The Baffler, my favourite magazine, recently published a piece called ‘Inglorious Bastards’ comparing Joe Biden’s domestic/foreign policy dynamic with that of Lyndon B Johnson, who was president from 1963 to ’69.
What connects them, writes Toby Jaffe, is their ‘stubborn faith in outdated modes of thinking during periods of historical tumult, as well as their complicity in the failed politics that brought about the tumult in the first place. For Johnson, this most obviously revealed itself in the Vietnam War. For Biden, this has most explicitly and recently revealed itself in his callous, fly-by-night response to Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, which is now spiraling, unchecked, into a broader regional conflict.’
The audioguide you get when you tour the caves in Vieng Xai contains some nauseating details. Laos’ population at the time of the US bombing campaign, from 1964 to 1973, was more or less 1 million. And the US dropped 2 million tons of explosives on the country, = 2 tons per person. Laos is famously the most heavily bombed country (per capita) ever. Villages have been destroyed that no one will ever know existed, because there was no record of them. Too remote, too disconnected, so uninvolved in the vagaries of geopolitics as to render their destruction entirely meaningless. During this period, villagers would soak their white clothes in puddles and roll them in the mud, so as to be less visible to the bombers that flew overhead. One captured pilot said his orders were simply to look for the colourful crests and bills of ducks and chickens: signs of human habitation. So villagers culled any animals that were too brightly coloured. Many Laotians had never even heard of America. They had no idea of why they were being killed, what the Cold War was, or what was meant by their meaningless slaughter. All they knew was that at dawn, the planes started, and a while after dusk, the noises would stop. Knowing any more might not have made it any better. Either way, the injustice fuelled their anger, which strengthened their resolve and motivated their resistance.
I came to Laos with high hopes but few expectations. As with other countries that have a history of being brutalised, either by hosting proxy wars or being seemingly beaten into submission by regional superpowers, it’s had quite a profound effect on me. Cycling through tiny hill villages, I’m greeted with a whole range of facial expressions, and I find myself wondering how much of their own history these people know, and how that knowledge affects how they interpret and respond to my presence. Going days without seeing any other foreigners, it’s clear they don’t see many white faces. And their reactions run the gamut from extraordinary excitement to something that looks like suspicion, or wariness, and it’s hard to predict. Age is an indicator but not a reliable one. I sit on a hill somewhere under the midday sun, with forested hills expanding in all directions, and imagine planes flying overhead, scouring the trees for signs of human life. Overall, it feels a world away from the hills of neighbouring Vietnam: there’s an economic disparity, but topography is also important. This entire region of northern Laos is basically mountainous, and has historically been hard to access, meaning it’s ‘retained’ a ‘simpler’ way of life, while most of Vietnam is within an hour or two’s drive from a substantial town or city – it has a very developed coastline, multiple urban centres, hubbub, sprawl.
Tigers used to roam over much of the forested north, but they now only occupy isolated and fragmented patches of land – 7% of their historical range across Asia, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society. The Vieng Xai caves audioguide said that well into the 20th century, the way you’d find out there were tigers in the area was by ‘stepping on one’. Zoiks!
I recently found out about Manifa Elephant Camp, on the way to Luang Prabang. It was set up by an elephant enthusiast called Vilaluck Vothivong who, with help from a German NGO, now looks after a herd of 17 elephants. It sits on 100 hectares of riverside forest. I may try to camp there. I also need to do some work on my bike. Front rack issues. And I’ve run out of chain oil. And my alan key can’t get enough purchase in the bolt that holds my rear brake cable in position. Work needs doing. But first, I think it’s time for a second croissant.
Love from me. X
Oh, by the way, in English we pronounce the country Laos as Laos, with the ‘s’ sound, just as we say Germany instead of Deutschland. But in Lao (the language), Laos is pronounced Lao. We say Laos (country), Lao (language) and Laotian (people), they say… I think… Lao, Lao and Lao. Oh, and lao in Lao means alcohol. So lao-Lao, a Laotian rice whisky, means alcohol of Laos. Language ♥︎
(A few pics below)
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I had a great deal to be grateful for today, and I wrote it all down. Well, some of it – there were things that happened after I’d put my pen away that made today a Very Special Day.
Firstly, the mountains west of Hanoi (I’m in Thanh Hoa district) are stunning, and provide the perfect counterpoint to help explain something I remember telling Laura while we were cycling in Georgia. I said the mountains in central Georgia – west of Tbilisi, east of Aspindza – are gorgeous because, or one of the remarkable things about them, is that they seem humble. They’re modest mountains: green-capped, unassuming; they roll gently, rise without erupting; and yet they’re easily 2,000m above sea level. They don’t jostle for attention but they’re beautiful. So, they’re humble, somehow. If you want to call them hills, fine. The descriptor still applies.
And if it sounds weird to hear mountains described as humble/modest then maybe the mountains (if you want to call them rock formations, fine) that dot Vietnam’s coastline, and form much of its western border region, make it make more sense. They absolutely erupt. In Ha Long Bay, Ninh Binh and on the way to Laos, they scream out for attention. They’re basically cliff faces, each one – vertical, some maybe even over-vertical. So showy, so ostentatious, so not humble. You’ve got to hand it to things that know the effect they have, and know how to work it. And yes, today I cycled through, around and among them a lot and it was wonderful.
Secondly, the cold, which had been sort of a pain in my ass while taking the air (meaning: resting for a day in Mai Chau because I didn’t sleep the night before because of the scheming rats nibbling bottles right by my head on the mattress on the floor, and the ache in my neck), made cycling all the better. It’s a useful skill, to flip the things that seem bad and turn them good. Cold weather cycling is a(n almost) sweat-free blast.
The cold onset of night was made to feel colder by the fact that the boiler in my hotel bathroom doesn’t boil. It gently warms, which would be a nice thing if it was called a gentlewarmer but it is not. Fortunately (this is Thing #3), while I was eating a bowl of phở at the local restaurant, two men at a nearby table invited me to sit with them and swiftly began plying me with ‘happy water’ – there’s a lot of this, in Vietnam – and talking as if I understood them. Then a local shopkeeper insisted on giving me far too many bananas. So, the cold can beat it.
Fourthly – finally – and most movingly, I saw something today that stopped me in my tracks, and goddamn near made me pass wind. It was an albino carabao. A white water buffalo. Which… I just Googled and apparently they’re not that rare. 3% of carabaos are albino. Wtf. Well I hadn’t seen one before today, so they’re rare to me, and it seemed sort of magical, a special thing. Its majesty left me speechless – not that I was mid-sentence – and when I stopped near it, it slowed its lumbering movements to a halt, turning its neck and stared right at me, only moving when someone rode past on a scooter. I took a couple of pictures, but it’s better if you imagine it, at least for now.
A white buffalo with a pink nose, piercingly light eyes, and, I was happy to see a few moments later, several other buffaloes to go galumphing with. I wondered if they saw the albino as being different from them. They didn’t seem to, but I couldn’t help it. They slipped by me into a clearing by the road to nibble some grass, and I rode off towards the border.
It’s been some time since I wrote anything here, and naturally that means there’s too much to contain within one blogpost.
But know that I – and we – are still here, and still trucking on. Laura is giving her legs (and everything else!) a rest in Cambodia, and I am in a small Vietnamese town called Hoa Binh, pointed west. I will cross over to Laos in the next few days, and then pedal onwards to Luang Prabang. Then I’ll travel by bus to rejoin her, and hang out with our friend Adam, in Siem Reap. Adventures await, and yet, at the same time, they’re also happening right now!
So much for the geographical stuff. There are a couple of other things – projects! – I’d like to tell you all about, partly because sharing them (as they are) will help motivate me to continue pursuing them. Ideas don’t do well locked away.
The first one, actually, is proving quite easy to work on, as it has to do with our trip. We recently launched a website with the same name as our Instagram handle (@OnOurBicycles) – we’re branding, see. Its purpose is to communicate what we’ve learned, and what we’ll learn in the future, about cycling in different places, to an audience of other cyclists. For this reason, not much of it will be relevant or particularly interesting to people who follow me/us because they’re friends or family. However, if you’d like to look at the photos we’ve been taking along the way, and want a better way to view them than by going on Instagram (I understand!), then the Photo Gallery part of the website may appeal. Just click here to find it, and click on whichever country takes your fancy. We’re working our way through backlogs of photos, which is why there isn’t yet a Vietnam section, and why the Turkey/Georgia photos are raw and unedited.
The second is something I’m working on by myself. It’s more booky, long-form prosey, and at its root its about the long-overdue Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Except, it’s not really about that, is it? It’s about humans and society, and what the so-called ‘second coming’ means. The question that kicked it all off – and the sort of working title, although I’m steering away from it somewhat – was/is: If He came, would we believe Him? As in, what would it take for the actual (second) coming of God On Earth to convince us that he (/He/She/It) was legit? It would certainly take more than walking on water, because David Blaine (or was it Dynamo) already did that.
Or, conversely, assuming Jesus wasn’t actually the Son of God but was instead an excellent preacher who provided humanity with something it didn’t know it needed, what would a contemporary equivalent look like? One of Jesus’ key selling points was that he wanted to democratise the religious experience: bring it inside the home. Slaves made up a huge proportion of Roman society; Jesus said they were made in God’s image as much as the emperor. He offered his flesh and blood, and his devotees really dug it. In an age of multi-layered irony and social media addiction, a poststructural, post-climate change, anthropocene age, what message could we receive that would awaken us? Can any one person provide that? Where should we be looking?
Threads that tie into this whole shebang include Brian Muraresku’s book The Immortality Key, which makes the (very convincing… possibly conclusive?) case that what really made Jesus’ stand out from all the other religious movements of the time was his way of democratising religious experience was by revealing the Eleusinian Mysteries to the masses: inviting everybody to God’s table by giving them wine spiked with psychoactive substances, allowing them to experience god at home, rather than by trekking to Eleusis. There is lots of juice here, but archaeo-chemistry (the scientific study of what people were eating and drinking during periods of ancient history) is a fledgling science – so young it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page!
They (the threads) also include one woman’s claim, published recently in the Pentagon’s UFO files, that she had experienced an ‘unaccounted-for pregnancy’. As in, aliens abducted her and impregnated her. Her claim was included in statistical form in a cache of previously classified documents released (to The Sun) by the Pentagon in April 2022. Which is obviously nuts, right?
But you know, in his 1957 book Flying Saucers, Carl Jung explains that the way we interpret inexplicable phenomena has changed over time. For thousands of years, weird lights in the sky were messages written by the gods – astrology was the ‘science’ of deciphering these messages. Then for a while we called them ‘angels’, then they were evidence of fairies and pixies. Now we call them foreign military aircrafts, or aliens. No one believed the woman from the Pentagon files was really carrying the Son of Aliens. But you know who else had an ‘unaccounted-for pregnancy’, and who was (ultimately) believed? Mary! And all it took was a thumb up from Joseph. Well, no, it took a lot more than that, but the comparison says something, I think.
So anyway, that’s what’s ticking over on my end. It’s a work in progress. And I’d like to open up some sort of dialogue with it, which is why I’m considering starting a Substack dedicated to it, where I’ll post things as and when I write them. Serialise it, sort of. That way, if people are interested, they can read along. And if they have any recommendations for things to consider/read/watch/listen to, they can chip in. I’d love that, and it would undoubtedly help the work. You can probably subscribe to my existing Substack at this link in order to get future updates. But I’ll get round to setting that up properly in the coming weeks. Or months.
OH, and there’s another prose thing I’ve been mulling on, but which I won’t bore you with now.
So for now, thank you for checking in. Be good to each other. We love you.
This is the fourth (and final!) part in a series I’ve called Postcards from Tajikistan. Feel free to read the other three parts before you read this one (not essential). The first is about cycling in Tajikistan, while the second and third are actually more about Afghanistan’s Taliban government and China’s BRI than they are about Tajikistan. Oh well. This one is about the borders Tajikistan shares with neighbours China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, how they’ve changed in recent years, and conflicts that have arisen during the process of officially demarcating them.
In Europe, for the most part, we’re used to borders being more or less fixed and, at the same time, relatively benign. Elsewhere not so. And the examples of where borders present a complex issue in Europe, such as between Serbia and Kosovo, or where the question of whether or not a border even exists has caused anguish in the 21st century, such as around the self-proclaimed independent region of Transnistria, in Moldova, or between Abkhazia and South Ossetia (as we call them) and (the rest of) Georgia, shed some light on how the border question plays out in Central Asia.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, its long arms retreated to its heartland, leaving the nations and/or regions it had imperialised to piece themselves back together. Macro level operations, which had distributed and shared resources between parts of the union, ceased to exist. And in the absence of slick and well organised government – Tajikistan was plunged into civil war after the dissolution of the USSR – grassroots cooperatives and communities suddenly had to fend for themselves.
But that’s easier said than done, especially if you live many miles away from a source of potable water, and you previously relied on edicts from a distant authority for access to water that now belongs in, or comes from, another country. Which is one of the complications that has led to conflict between Tajikistan and its northerly neighbour, Kyrgyzstan.
The border the two countries share was closed in spring 2021 – a three-day armed conflict began on 28 April. And it remained closed until late July 2023 (although maybe not officially until early August). Even now, the protocol for crossing between them has yet to be ironed out – although it is getting there. We crossed by bicycle in October 2023.
The crux of the conflict, argues Kyrgyz author Viktoria Akchurina, is a clash of logics between the immovability of a border and the always-movingness water. Water is life, and it is volatile and unpredictable, especially in mountain regions. For this reason, dams and reservoirs have been essential to ensuring water security in Central Asia. In recent years, Kyrgyzstan and its neighbours, especially Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, have been trying to officially demarcate their national borders, and water management appears to be the biggest obstacle to a peaceful and just resolution of the nations’ border disputes.
Seen through a purely political-economic lens, the calculation needed to work out how to fairly distribute the water is immensely complex. This is because much of it is stored in reservoirs built using – for example – Uzbek money, Kyrgyz workers and Tajik materials. If a certain percentage of a reservoir’s water comes from a river that flows two-thirds through one country and one-third through another, or part-way along two countries’ shared border and part-way along another, and has tributaries that originate in mountains that belong to one country or another, you can see how the mathematics of it can be headache-inducing. To whom does rainfall belong?
Add to that the different speeds at which each nation’s population is increasing – meaning changes to how much water each populace requires – and you have a very complicated problem indeed. Which is why Akchurina, in her book Incomplete State-Building in Central Asia: The State as Social Practice, advocates taking a humanistic, grassroots approach that focuses first on community building and working across borders – even ignoring them – in favour of pragmatism. At the same time, she severely discourages using terms like ‘interstate conflict’ or ‘interstate war’ to describe the situation, since it only leads people to see these as issues that must be solved using a top-down, political-hierarchical approach, and only lead to more escalations.
(Article continues after picture)
Meanwhile, Tajikistan’s border with Afghanistan is delineated, at least in part, in arguably the cleanest and most convenient way: along a river. Find more on Tajikistan–Afghanistan in the first part of this series (links in intro).
We spoke to a Tajik homestay owner who told us the reason China wanted the land so much was because it contained rare earth minerals. Whether or not this is true, the benefit to both countries, and indirectly to the region as a whole, is that the length of border that’s disputed has been reduced. Nevertheless, Tajiks were polarised on the issue, some seeing it as a triumph of diplomacy, others as a loss to the nation – and not necessarily without reason.
Hamrokhon Zarifi, then Tajik foreign minister, celebrated the fact that his country had handed over just 3.5% of the area in dispute (as opposed to a higher percentage). On the other hand, Muhiddin Kabiri, then the leader of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, saw it as a violation of his country’s ‘inseparable and inviolable’ territory. No doubt others felt similarly.
Assel Bitabarovza of Hokkaido University interviewed Tajiks from a range of backgrounds and found the protocol, and its ratification, to be a sensitive issue. This was, she writes, in part because all of the contested lands between Tajikistan and China were ‘situated within territory under de-facto control of Tajikistan’. Previously they had been part of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.
She talks about a ‘discourse of territory loss’, experienced in complex ways that have to do with treaties signed by Czarist Russia and the Qing Empire, questions of imperialism and postcolonialism, and the Tajik government’s general approach to the deal. Some people think they rushed into it – the opposing view might be that the government was refreshingly decisive.
Back to the possibility of rare earth minerals: Bitabarovza mentions theories regarding ‘precious metal deposits’ and ‘gem mines’ in the Sarykol mountain range, ‘alluvial gold deposits’ near the Markansu River and Rangkul Lake, and uranium mines within or close to the ceded land. What’s curious is that Bitabarovza spoke to several academics – including those in support of the border protocol – who weren’t able to show her where exactly the territories transferred to Chinese sovereignty were. And she tried ‘fruitlessly’ to contact someone ‘competent’ who could give her an accurate and official map.
But: whether or not Tajiks recognised it at the time, the land-sovereignty transfer seems to have had a positive indirect domino effect for Tajikistan. After the opening of the Tajik-Chinese border crossing at the Kulma (or Qolma) Pass, which only happened in 2004, formally demarcating their shared border was an important stepping stone in establishing strong diplomatic relations between the two countries. Bilateral trade has since increased, and China is making huge infrastructure investments in Tajikistan via the BRI – see postcard pt. 3!
Bitabarovza talks about ‘breaking [Tajikistan’s] isolation’, and relays the view that ‘the resolution of territorial dispute serves as a basis for fostering friendly relations with China’. Which is obviously good for Tajiks. Chinese investment is improving their road network and connecting them better to each other. Also important is that improving Tajikistan’s internal road network makes it easier for Tajiks to conduct trade with its neighbours besides China, such as Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan – win-win-win(-win?).
OK. That’s all for Postcard from Tajikistan. Thanks for reading. Find links to the other parts in the series in the introduction to this article. And other fun and games elsewhere on this website!
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This article is the third in a series I’m calling ‘Postcard from Tajikistan’, a lot of which isn’t actually about Tajikistan but is instead about what I was thinking about while we were cycling through it. (Find parts 1 and 2 here and here.) Afghanistan, China, the US, Sri Lanka, etc. This one’s (mostly) about the Belt and Road Initiative, and how it gets misrepresented in the western press.
A Chinese construction company is rebuilding the part of the M41 (aka the Pamir Highway) that runs from Qal’ai Khum to Rushon. Note: there doesn’t seem to be much consensus on how to spell the names of all the towns. Some people write Kalaikhum, some write Qal’ai-Khum, etc. Rushon is sometimes written Rûshan (as in the title). It’s a hodgepodge. Here I’m mostly using spellings copied from a Tajik news website, with a few inconsistencies for fun.
The Qal’ai Khum–Rushon road is about 110km long, very winding and quite mountainous, and will ultimately reduce to 90km, because of the construction of two long tunnels. The project also includes a 490m-long avalanche gallery and 15 bridges with a total length of 634m.
Once that’s done, they’ll move on to rebuilding/renovating the road connecting Rushon and Khorog (163km), at an estimated cost of $200m, and the Khorog–Kulma (Chinese border) section (396km), for which $567m has been earmarked.
Obviously the temptation is to condemn news media censorship as typical of an authoritarian government, something that would never happen here, except it did happen here, very recently, when European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen called for the censorship of two major news agencies. In February 2022, she announced measures to ‘turn off the tab for […] information manipulation in Europe’ by banning Russia Today and Sputnik, from broadcasting in all of Europe.
And the narrative that China cancelled Sri Lanka’s debt in exchange for control of the Hambantota port is both oversimple and misleading. Still believed by many despite being thoroughly discredited, it was summed up neatly by former US attorney general William P Barr, who claimed that Beijing ‘load[s] poor countries up with debt, refusing to renegotiate terms, and then tak[es] control of the infrastructure itself’.
According to The Atlantic’s research, it was in fact a Canadian company that carried out the initial feasibility study for the Hambantota port project, followed by a Danish company. In 2007, Sri Lanka’s government approached the US and India for help building it, but both countries said no. Eventually, China Harbor won the contract, with China Eximbank agreeing to fund it.
Seven years later, the port was haemorrhaging money, so the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) signed a deal with China Harbor and China Merchants Group to have them continue to develop, and to operate, the port for 35 years. In 2015, when Rajapaksa was beaten at the polls by Maithripala Sirisena, Sri Lanka owed more to Japan, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank than it did to China.
In 2017, Sri Lanka paid a total of $4.5 billion in debt service. Only 5% of that was because of Hambantota. And when it opted to raise some funds by leasing out the port – which was still underperforming, apparently because the SLPA had ignored planning advice regarding how to run the port in the first place – to an experienced company, it used the $1.12 billion infusion to ‘bolster its foreign reserves’ (per The Atlantic), not to pay off the Chinese bank.
Basically, political and economic turmoil in Sri Lanka meant that American and European creditors wouldn’t go near Hambantota. Then, when Chinese firms picked up the tab, Sri Lanka’s economy imploded, leaving it unable to repay debts to several international creditors, of which China Eximbank was one.
As The Atlantic’s article notes, China’s ‘march outward, like its domestic development, is probing and experimental’. And after constructing the Hambantota port on Sri Lanka’s coast, the companies in question likely learned important lessons about mitigating against the effects of political instability.
And besides, there are a limited number of ways in which a regional (or global) hegemon can involve itself structurally and substantially with the affairs of other sovereign nations. China’s primary approach – i.e., the BRI, which is basically construction projects helmed by Chinese companies, see the video below for British rapper and journalist Akala’s perspective on China-funded developments in Jamaica, in 2018 – China’s approach is undoubtedly less destructive than those of the US and its allies in Europe, which usually involve bombing campaigns, gutting economies, stealing fossil fuels and launching coups d’etat, and this shows in the attitudes of the vast majority of the world towards the two methodologies.
The Vietnamese tourist we met who had been in Afghanistan said that Afghans presumed he was Chinese, and he said he let them believe he was, because they treated him with so much respect for it. Again: they respected him because they thought he was Chinese. Public attitudes towards China in developing countries, research shows, are economy-orientated and positive. On the other hand, in developed countries, people view China through the lens of ideology. This means they’re more susceptible to having their opinions formed by rhetoric (anti-China media narratives and propaganda), as opposed to evidence (bridges successfully built, high-speed railways successfully operating).
Lots of people have a view on China. Some of those views are informed, either by direct experience or investigative research. Others by news outlets that tow governmental lines. We met two Dutch brothers, for example, one of whom said they had worked with Chinese businesspeople and came away from those experiences soured towards the country. Fair enough, I thought. At least it’s based on firsthand experience. But lots of people are critical of China based on headlines they’ve seen in newspapers, online or on TV.
The issue is that mainstream journalists in the West self-censor when it comes to reporting on China and its goings-on. This is self-evident, since almost everything you see or hear from mainstream news outlets in the UK and US is overtly negative towards China. As Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman explain in Manufacturing Consent, it’s not necessary for news companies to censor by edict. The journalists that make it to the top, to the roles that have editorial impact, only make it there because they self-censor, say the right thing, don’t cross the line. From Chomsky and Herman’s research, it’s clear that this was the case in the US mainstream press in the 1970s and 1980s, and I think it’s definitely true to an extent in the UK in 2023. China’s accomplishments are treated with suspicion.
The fact that Chinese people overwhelmingly trust their government is treated as a symptom of brainwashing. When China sends warships into the waters off its own coastline, it is depicted as a military provocation, while the US’ military activity in the waters off China’s coastline is depicted as a defensive measure. China’s crackdown on Islamist extremism in its northwest Xinjiang province, while undoubtedly severe and decisive, was also provoked and arguably necessary, and has been persistently and emphatically characterised as genocidal.
I write this from Xinjiang, where Han Chinese (the country’s ethnic majority) and Uighur people (the Turkic minority) seem live side by side very peaceably; where Uighur language, which has used the Arabic script officially since 1987, is widely visible, on bus stops and shop fronts; and where the bread we’ve been seeing all over Central Asia is widely available. (I edit this from Qingdao, south of Beijing, where we just ate at a restaurant serving Xinjiang cuisine.)
There are a couple of people I follow on X/Twitter who have been consistently really instructive on the issue of western dis- and misinformation, and propaganda, regarding China. One is Kyle (@KyleTrainEmoji). Another is Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand).
So… this is what I was thinking about while we were sitting in the taxi between Qal’ai Khumb and Roshan, or Rushan, as we wended our way between steep rock faces, along the grey-green river, passing Chinese-made Shacman trucks by the dozen. By the time we got to Alichur, the Shacman trucks had disappeared. Things quietened down; the traffic petered out; and the arid, jagged wilds of eastern Tajikistan stretched out on either side of the Pamir Highway.
Alichur is a small town, connected only, via the M41, to Khorog and Murghab. And while it has a certain charm, there certainly isn’t much do there. It has 379 houses and a population of around 1,300, of which 45 are teachers. Before COVID, there were eight homestays. Now there are only three, including Shukrona, where we stayed.
Rahmani, its owner, has lived in the town for 38 years, having been sent here on a one-year teaching contract, by the government, after finishing her studies in Dushanbe. She’s been here ever since and has run the homestay for 16 years. In 2019, a new water pump was installed in the centre of town, reducing the load on the existing one. But hers is the only house in Alichur with electricity, and it gets it by means of an array of solar panels paid for and installed with the help of a foreign charity.
During her nearly four decades here, things have changed, not least with regard to the environment. She found it tough when she first arrived, she tells us, because the hostile winds blew incessantly and it never rained. Now, the local climate has, apparently, calmed somewhat. It rains occasionally, and the wind relents.
The house is heated by burning cakes of cowdung. Fuel is created by taking the cows down to the river, where the grass is relatively plentiful, and harvesting their waste. In this sense it is renewable, but it’s dirty and polluting compared to burning gas or oil. Burning cowdung as fuel is widespread in the world’s poorer regions. In his latest book, Bjorn Lomborg writes that inhaling its fumes can do serious damage to people’s respiratory systems, and that a better organised global response to extreme temperatures would ensure that even the poorest people in the world have access to relatively clean – and still cheap – gas for cooking and heating their homes.
But the global response to extreme temperatures, and climate change at large, isn’t well organised. So Rahmani, and many others in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and elsewhere, will probably keep collecting and burning dung cakes for the rest of their lives.
To be continued… again again…
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This article follows on from last week’s, titled Postcard from… Tajikistan (to be read first, ideally). There will probably be one or two more in the following days/weeks, about our cycling in Tajikistan and its GBAO region!
…So in order to learn a bit more about the Taliban, I read Jon Lee Anderson’s New Yorker article on the group – ‘The Taliban confront the realities of power’ – published a few months after the US withdrew its troops. He had feet on the ground at a crucial time, and seems to have gleaned more about contemporary Afghan politics than most journalists reporting on it.
Reading the article, a picture began to form in my mind of men joining the Taliban because of the security it affords them and their families. Like joining the military or law enforcement in any other unstable country, being a member of Afghanistan’s Taliban government, or being affiliated with the group more broadly, likely confers some kind of guarantee of status and income in a country otherwise beleaguered by instability and economic uncertainty.
We thought it would be interesting to compare Afghanistan’s Taliban government with the United States’ current Democratic Party administration. Which one has placed more restrictions on the rights of its own citizens, and the lives of others? Which one has done more to promote universal healthcare and social mobility? Which one has used its Security Council veto power to quash more United Nations resolutions? Or, which has dropped more bombs on the civilians and civilian infrastructure of other sovereign nations?
(President Biden was kind enough to restart publication of the Pentagon’s monthly Airpower Summaries after Trump put a halt to them in February 2020. In the first year of his administration, Biden presided over the dropping of 1,178 bombs and missiles on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Planes to Israel, to help the Israel Defense Forces reduce Gaza, an underdog enclave of mostly innocent people, to rubble, have ‘already taken off’. The United States has also sent aircraft carriers and supporting ships to support Israel – nothing to support Palestine, obviously.)
Most people in the developed West, even those critical of the US, would probably instinctively say that the Biden administration’s domestic policies are less oppressive than those of Afghanistan’s Taliban government. But when it comes to foreign policy, it seems obvious to me that America has the most dangerous track record of any sovereign nation – post-WII, at least.
In the lead up to the 2008 US presidential election, which Obama ended up winning, CBS News anchor Katie Couric asked the ten leading candidates which country frightened them the most. The question was supposed to ‘go beyond politics’. Biden and Clinton said Pakistan. John Edwards said China.
The rest said Iran (North Korea and Russia received honourable mentions), pinning their fears on the ‘zealotry’ of its theologians (Fred Thompson), the fact that it possesses nuclear weapons and the capacity to deploy them (Rudy Giuliani and Barack Obama), that it poses a ‘threat to stability’ especially with regard to ‘energy supplies’ (Barack Obama), and that it has a leader who is ‘happy to pull the trigger’ (Mike Huckabee).
John McCain was one of the few to recognise the role the US had played in creating what it regards as a threat to its own security, noting the Iraq war’s knock-on effects in terms of regional (in)stability and intoning, with disarming lucidity, that ‘when bad things happen, bad things happen’.
Of course it’s interesting and it can be eye-opening to raise a mirror to US politicians’ criticisms of other nations and see how their own country stands up. Zealotry, defined as the ‘fanatical or uncompromising pursuit of a set of ideals’, and the ‘intolerance of conflicting beliefs’, is foundational to American political culture, to the extent that one scholar suggests that counterterrorism policies are the best way to respond to certain political trends in the United States.
The only nation ever to deploy a nuclear weapon is the United States, and it did so twice, having playfully nicknamed the bombs Little Boy and Fat Man, ha-ha. Precedent is a marker of potential. America has military personnel stationed literally everywhere, never more than a stone’s throw from the borders of nations from which is claims to fear uprisings.
And regarding threats to energy supplies, in February 2022 Biden threatened to ‘bring an end’ to the Nord Stream gas pipeline so much of Europe relied on for affordable gas, should the Russian Federation invade Ukraine. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reckons America blew it up in order to sustain the United States’ ‘long-standing primacy in Western Europe’. He called it the ‘perfect crime’.
So anyway, this is what I was thinking about while we left behind our view of Afghanistan, and while I flicked through the Instagram photos of the Kurdish man we met in Dushanbe who was, by this point, several days into his tour of the country. Someone else who had cycled through Afghanistan called it a ‘fourth world country’, but based on what I’ve read it doesn’t seem like the Taliban are responsible for this. Before the US’ direct involvement in Afghanistan was the Soviet–Afghan War. Afghanistan has not had an easy time. The first step to helping people get back on their feet is probably to stop bombing them.
Jon Lee Anderson reports on a bunch of quite interesting things apparently going on there. For one, the war on ‘graven images’ that marked the Taliban’s 1990s stint in power has softened markedly, he says. Enforcing such a strict policy is impossible anyway because of the rise of smartphones and social media websites. Senior Taliban leaders told him that the ‘depravity’ and ‘chaos’ that – in their view – characterised the 1990s made it necessary to enforce sharia law during their first era of rule. Now, they claim to be driven by ‘mercy and compassion’.
At the same time, however, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs has reportedly closed; the new Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice inhabits its old home. Anderson writes that women employed by the government are ‘being forced to sign in at their jobs and then go home, to create the illusion of equity’. Which is pretty stupid, obviously. But then, the US spent $2 trillion over 18 years on maintaining war in Afghanistan, and killed 43,000 Afghan civilians in the process. So you know, potato potato.
To be continued… again…
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In total, we were in Tajikistan for just under four weeks, and spent most of those days on two wheels: we cycled in from Uzbekistan, in the west; through Panjakent, Ayni and the infamous Istiklol Tunnel (aka ‘Tunnel of Death’); to the capital, Dushanbe, and onwards via the town of Kulob in the south to Qal’ai Khumb; from there we took a shared taxi to Rŭshan, in order to avoid roadworks and mountain blasting led by a Chinese construction company as part of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative; and then onto the Pamir Highway proper, via Khorog, Alichur, Murghab and Karakul, to Kyrgyzstan. We crossed the border at the Kyzyl Art pass in late September. It was very snowy, and I was sick.
On the way, we passed endless streams of fluorescent orange Shacman trucks wending their way like lemmings through Tajikistan’s deepcut valleys. These trucks ply Tajikistan’s rocky highways day in, day out, and are the life force of its several massive ongoing construction projects. They climb hills with their bonnets open so as to catch the cool air and save, so one presumes, their radiators from self-destruction in the unrelenting heat of the country’s lowlands: landlocked, dust-dry.
Those with faulty brakes have a lifeline. Continuous descents are marked with emergency exits in case of brake failure, although they really are for emergencies only. They’re steep off-ramps something like thirty metres long, leading straight off the road to rubbly dead-ends. Pomegranate trees line the highway, dangling their awkward, bulbous, majestic fruits like forbidden apples over residential fences and enticing drivers and cyclists.
Once you get onto the Pamir Highway proper, i.e. past Khorog and up to 4,000 metres above sea level, most of the traffic dies away. The lion’s share of it is tourist traffic. Jeeps on tours and taxis ferrying overland travellers from one town to the next. Cyclists are almost as common as cars.
Toilets are pits dug deep into the ground, with doorless huts around them. They put out so potent an aroma of ammonia that you feel heady as soon as you squat, and you rush so as to get (it) out quicker. There is shit on the floor around you, and there are scraps of sandpaper-like toilet tissue overflowing from the bucket bin. Tajik toilet paper does not wrap around a cardboard tube, like we’re used to. It does not employ a Labrador Retriever puppy to advertise its softness.
As we cycle past, young children scream at us from the roadside, inviting us into their home before even asking their parents’ permission. The parents are more muted in their enthusiasm, but they seem glad to have us. They know by now that we’ll insist on giving them some somoni – named after the father of the Tajik nation, Ismail Samani – on our way out. Money they’ll obstinately refuse, at least at first, despite it matching a week’s wages. It’s culturally acceptable to insist, so we do.
Young men place their hands on their hearts as we pass, sombrely wishing us well. Boys on mountain bikes wave Tajik flags and accompany us like a royal procession through small mountain villages, shouting, singing and waving, their spoke reflectors flashing in the late morning sunlight. We feel like presidents. The whole town knows we’re here. They’ve given us flags of our own, which we fasten with sellotape to our bike frames.
The longest climbs are made no easier by the fruit sellers insisting we take their melons, each one weighing a kilogram or more, piled high on top of our panniers and racks. But their smiles are infectious. Young guys in their 20s, not long out of military service, delighted for the opportunity to give away their family’s crop. Or else it’s middle-aged women with gold teeth and pattened headscarves, magenta socks and matching sliders, filling our bags from their buckets of apples, grapes, pears. September is the month of plenty.
Between villages and oases of green, however, it’s all rock and water. Plumes of dust and razorsharp blue skies, incongruously fresh asphalt sometimes four lanes wide, laid as if by giants in a single strip, and machine guns. Tajikistan’s border with Afghanistan is heavily militarised, although there’s no sign of anything military on the other side. Numerous outposts with single-person sort of pillboxes made out of loose rock cobbled together, sometimes with thick cardboard and wiring holding them fast.
Nearing the Tajik–Afghan border, a thick mist – being the rose-tinted interpretation of what it was, the fog consisting, likely in large part, of mountain dust – enshrouded us in yellow, adding to the feeling that the country on the other side of the grey river was hidden behind a veil of secrecy. Two of the people (one half of a German couple and a Vietnamese man) from our hostel in Dushanbe had arrived from Afghanistan; a third (Kurdish) was on his way there. The melon sellers ask if that’s where we’re headed.
The border recently reopened after four years of closure, meaning the handful of more or less weekly Afghan bazaars that dot the border have started up again. Afghans cross the Pyandzh River via rickety-looking pedestrian bridges that wave side to side with the wind. Sharofat, a zealous, kind and asinine woman who runs a homestay in Khorog, told us it was only the second time the town’s bazaar had taken place since the borders reopened, but having visited it in the morning spoke dismissively of its vendors, saying they were Taliban.
Many of those milling around the stalls also appeared to be Afghan, and we spoke to one who has been a tour operator in the country for 15 years. He told us this was a particularly good year to visit the embattled nation, perhaps because, without the military presence of the US and its allies crawling over its surface, the country has had a chance to reassess and reshuffle. The dust is settling.
But Sharofat’s comments prompted some reflection. What does it mean to be a member of the Taliban? Is it equivalent to being a member of a political party in a Western nation? One instinctively thinks it must involve more than that. But is there an initiation rite, an ideological questionnaire, or is it as simple as signing a name on a dotted line and donning a piece of regalia symbolising membership?
To be continued…
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ONURBICYCLE 